Lean Learning

Yes, education is a business; as our economy tanks and budgets crash with it, more and more you will see a business ROI - return on investment - approach to education replace the trendy psycho-babble that now runs it. Watch for application of such techniques as "lean manufacturing" - doing more with less - to education. The days of more are over. Educators are going to "hit the wall" - get a reality check - soon because of this.

Can Canada avoid trends in American education?

Dave, thank you for this.  What's missing is the collapsing standards overall as the educational dinosaurs scramble to enroll bodies - real and fake - to get cash flow at any cost.  Except for hardcore subjects like medicine, the M.D. hopefully will not get watered down, and fields like no-nonsense engineering; the other subject areas, the "soft sciences" and the humanities will suffer from Gresham's Law - "bad money drives out good money." Degrees will have little or no meaning or value in these fields, unless they come from very elite, tough standards, no-nonsense college or universities.  As one of my UW-Madison professors put it in our course on ethics of higher education, "The colleges and universities that keep high, high standards will always be in demand, for there will always be people with money to buy the best."  Also, he observed, to create such high standards you could not let the business office call the shots.  You had to let high academic values, standards set the agenda; the money would follow.  Instead we have the reverse in more and more cases.  Making money in the short run regardless of standards will blow up the organizations peddling valueless degrees.  The one with hard, tough, steely academic standards will in fact survive and make money.  As A.J. Nock observed, "Americans have a gift for turning everything into a racket."  In this case, so-called higher education has become a racket.  In the end, however, people will not pay for fake degrees, and those who are serious and can benefit from learning will go to those places that have maintained good-and-hard standards.  There, you have your humble servant's studied opinion.  Paul